Here are 3 words to help evaluate your social media presence online: information, celebration and inspiration.
INFORMATION – There is no way around this, but not everything we do is worthy of a social media post.
If you find that you are posting primarily about information self-promoting all your activities, start asking yourself what is important enough for me to want EVERYONE to know about it? A visit to speak at the local FCA may not be important enough to broadcast to all of your followers, however, a major back to school event for middle school and high school students where you are inviting parents probably is. Often you will want to use the Information category for last minute changes due to weather, travel delays or anything that everyone needs to know as soon as possible.
In the information section, you can also use a lot of photos with simple text over it.
CELEBRATION – By following other ministry accounts, you will start noticing other churches doing this. After a great turn out for an event, or after a certain number of professions of faith, baptisms, some students ministries would simply post a blurred out photo and the number of decisions made for Christ. The caption would read how the previous night they had seen God moving in a powerful way and they were excited about it. That’s it. No meeting times and locations, no “join us next week so you too can be one of these”. They simply celebrated what God had done.
Find one student who made a decision, who had a revelation about his sin, who decided to help others and with their permission, share their story. Take a nice picture of that teenager and write a few lines about them in the caption. Boom, you’ve celebrated what God is doing!
INSPIRATION – The final piece of the puzzle is to inspire your followers. The simplest way to reach students throughout the week is to post scripture, quotes from authors, or maybe even the bottom line from our message the night before. As a student walks around school, or is riding home from sports or even procrastinating from his/her homework, they will stumble upon some Gospel truths. These have the power to really change their lives.
And now, to evaluate…
Whatever you do, across all 3 categories, be sure to tell great stories about what God is doing. Let that be the promotion for your ministry.
BONUS WORD – One last word you can use for evaluating purposes is INTERACTION. This refers to likes, comments and using hashtags. We can’t control if our followers post or not, but we can try to create campaigns, polls, questions and clever hashtags as opportunities to invite them to interact with our posts.
Source: Ministry Tech
For more great ideas on how to communicate effectively with your congregation, contact one of our Shelby Ministry Consultants today!